Madam Speaker, I would first like to thank all my colleagues from all parties who agreed to study aviation safety at the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities.
As this subject was of concern to me, I was both surprised and disappointed by the minister's reply to one of my questions in the House about this.
I will provide the context for those interested in the question. I stated:
...according to internal documents from Transport Canada, pilot proficiency tests will be conducted by the airlines themselves, rather than by Transport Canada inspectors...
The airline companies will test their own pilots.
What I was asking the minister was whether he was planning to put an end to this practice, which was similar to that of the Conservative government in power before the Liberals. The Conservatives allowed more and more self-regulation, which did not always have the desired effect on safety. In fact, as we speak, 90% of the industry's pilots are tested not by Transport Canada inspectors, but by the airline companies themselves. I was truly perplexed by the minister's reply.
I would like to quote an excerpt. He said, “we periodically conduct an...audit”. There is already a problem here. We are talking about aviation safety and he said, “Using a risk-based approach, we periodically conduct an airline safety audit.” In other words, no inspections are conducted if things seem to be going well. However, aviation safety and air accidents involve injury and death. Conducting audits periodically, looking at the statistics after the fact, and seeing that, strangely enough, there have been more injuries and death is no way to determine that more inspections are needed. That seems to be a rather contradictory approach to me.
There are some other important elements that make the minister's response even more ambiguous. I would like to list a few in the time that I have left. As I just said, Transport Canada is reducing the number of safety inspectors. The Liberal government cut the aviation safety budget by 15% from 2015 to 2017. Transport Canada documents indicate that, for 2016-17, the number of inspections in reaction to accidents, thus after the fact, is nine times higher than preventive inspections. It seems to me that the point of an inspection is to prevent an accident from happening, not to react after it has happened.
We could also talk about the comments made by expert Mr. Moshansky, who said:
Transport Canada has now totally abandoned traditional hands-on regulatory oversight, in-flight inspections and audits across the aviation system...
I am going to skip some examples and come back to the basic question that I asked the minister in the hopes that this evening I will get a response that is more coherent and more in keeping with the statistics that continue to rise. The fact that the numbers are going up means that we are not going in the right direction.
Does the Liberal government intend to reverse this decision and give Transport Canada inspectors back the full authority over inspections?